Transcript

00:00:01

>> The Museum of Everything's latest venue, a former barber shop in London's Marylebone. It calls itself the world's only wandering museum for unschooled artists. But here, it has come to rest with its first permanent space. The Gallery of Everything will sell works by the self-taught, those whose work mainstream galleries rarely touch.

00:00:20

Profits will fund the museum's work to break down the barriers for such artists. I'm Reuters reporter Lucy Field, here at London's first commercial gallery dedicated to so-called outsider art. The Gallery of Everything aims to tell an alternative history of art. These works date from the 19th century to now.

00:00:39

Journeys into the Outside, its first exhibition, is based on a 1998 TV series, featuring former Pulp front man, Jarvis Cocker. Cocker met characters such as William Carlton Rice, a self-ordained minister, whose vast cross garden became a local landmark. These crucifixes weren't intended as artworks. He just wanted to warn passersby they'd be punished for their sins.

00:01:02

Bicycle repairman Howard Finster, a late preacher, believed God had told him to create art. He became a celebrated self-taught artist almost by accident. Museum of Everything founder James Brett rejects the term outsider art as degrading.>> Because many of the artists are either a little bit vulnerable or at the lower end of society or somehow being disenfranchised a bit, their need to speak and say something is all the greater because it's, I am somebody, I want to be heard.

00:01:30

And I think what these people show is that art making is something much more profound. It's a behavior that's very ingrained in us. It's not this art that we think it is. It's not the objects.>> Since it started in 2009, The Museum of Everything has won acclaim in the very art establishment it stands apart from.